BIM 360 no longer exists as something you can buy. Autodesk folded it into Autodesk Construction Cloud, renamed Autodesk Forma in March 2026, and the closest equivalent most AEC teams end up on is BIM Collaborate Pro, now sold as Forma Design Collaboration, which lists at roughly $1,284 per user per year. Autodesk Docs sits near $500 per user and Autodesk Build near $1,625. Every one of those is a starting point, because Autodesk prices through sales quotes rather than a checkout page.
That matters more than the sticker. Teams rarely get caught out by the per-seat number. They get caught out by how many seats they end up needing, and by the work the platform will not do for them.
This piece is about the decision that follows the price: when the Autodesk stack is the right thing to buy, and when a team is better served building the piece it actually needs. For the full tier-by-tier breakdown, see our Autodesk BIM 360 and ACC pricing guide.
What happened to BIM 360
BIM 360 was a family of modules: Docs, Design, Glue, Build. Autodesk consolidated that family into Autodesk Construction Cloud. The capabilities did not disappear, but the packaging changed, and the names people still search for no longer map cleanly onto anything you can put in a basket.
The practical consequence: a quote you were given two years ago is not comparable to a quote today, and a competitor’s published figure is probably not the figure you will be offered.
What the tiers cost, and what the list price hides
| Product | Indicative list | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Autodesk Docs | ~$500 per user / year | Document management and common data environment |
| BIM Collaborate Pro | ~$1,284 per user / year | Design collaboration and coordination, Revit and Civil 3D worksharing |
| Autodesk Build | ~$1,625 per user / year | Field execution, quality, cost and closeout |
Three things the list price does not tell you.
Seat count grows faster than headcount. Coordination tools spread. The people who need access are not only the modellers, and every subcontractor who touches the model is a licensing conversation.
The quote is negotiable and therefore unpredictable. Autodesk sells through quotes and resellers. Multi-year commitments, token-based access and enterprise agreements all move the number. Budget from your own quote, not from a published figure, including ours.
Integration is the line item nobody forecasts. The stack is strong inside its own boundary. The cost shows up where it meets your ERP, your finance system, or whatever the client insists on reporting into.
When buying Autodesk is clearly right
- Your models already live in Revit or Civil 3D. The coordination workflow is the product, and rebuilding it is not a sensible use of anyone’s budget.
- Your clients or regulators mandate it. On a lot of public work the deliverable format is not yours to choose.
- You need it working this quarter. Buying is fast. Building is not.
- Your problem is coordination, not data. Clash detection, issue tracking, model review: this is what the platform is for, and it does it well.
When teams outgrow it
The pattern we see is rarely a team rejecting Autodesk. It is a team keeping Autodesk for coordination and building something narrow beside it, usually for one of these reasons.
The data needs to leave. Model data is trapped in a format your operations, finance or client reporting cannot consume. The platform was never meant to be your system of record.
The workflow is yours, not the industry’s. Every firm has a process that does not exist in any product: a specific approval chain, a bespoke handover, a client portal with unusual rules. Configuring a platform to approximate it usually costs more than building the small thing that does it exactly.
The seat maths stops working. When occasional users need access and each one is a full seat, a lightweight internal tool reading from the same source becomes cheaper quickly.
The field reality does not fit. Low connectivity, gloved hands, ruggedised hardware. Generic SaaS assumptions break on a job site more often than they break in an office.
How the seat maths actually bites
The clearest way to see this is to price the same team two ways. The figures below use the indicative list prices above, so treat them as arithmetic rather than a quote.
Take a team of eight modellers on BIM Collaborate Pro. At roughly $1,284 each that is about $10,300 a year, which most firms find reasonable for what they get.
Now add the people who need to see the model without authoring it: two project managers, a QS, a client-side reviewer, and a handful of subcontractors during fit-out. If those land on full seats rather than a lighter tier, the same project can double before anyone has changed how they work. Nothing went wrong. The tool simply prices access the way it prices authoring.
This is the point where a small internal viewer, reading from the same source of truth, starts paying for itself, and it is also the point at which most teams first ask whether they should be building something.
The alternatives worth knowing about
Autodesk is not the only option, though it is the default where Revit is already in the workflow.
Trimble Connect publishes its pricing openly, which is unusual in this market: the Business tier is $12.99 per user per month and Business Premium is $23.95, both billed annually. A free tier exists for a single project. It is strong on data sharing and model management, lighter on deep BIM coordination.
Procore quotes custom pricing tied to construction volume rather than seats, which changes the seat-count problem above entirely. It is strongest on project and field management rather than design coordination.
The honest summary: if your models are in Revit, Autodesk’s coordination is hard to leave. If your bottleneck is field execution or document flow rather than clash detection, the comparison is much more open than the market’s defaults suggest.
What to ask before you sign
- What is the cheapest tier that gives read access? Ask specifically about viewer or occasional-user pricing before you assume everyone needs a full seat.
- What does the number look like at year four? Multi-year discounts often front-load the saving.
- How does our data get out? Ask about export formats and API access at the point of purchase, not after.
- What breaks if a subcontractor will not adopt it? Adoption on the supply chain side is where these rollouts usually stall.
- Which of our workflows will we have to change to fit the tool? If the answer is the one that wins you work, weigh that carefully.
How to decide
A test that works: if the capability is something every AEC firm needs, buy it. If it is the reason your firm wins work, consider building it.
Coordination, clash detection and document control are table stakes. Nobody wins a bid because their clash detection is proprietary. But the way you package a handover, or the visibility you give a client mid-project, might be exactly what differentiates you, and that is worth owning.
In practice most teams land on a split: Autodesk for the model and the coordination, something custom for the layer where their data has to meet the rest of the business. That is usually a smaller build than people expect, because it reads from the platform rather than replacing it.
If you are weighing that split, our construction platform engineering work is exactly this: the integration and field layer around a stack you keep.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still buy BIM 360?
No. It is part of Autodesk Construction Cloud now. BIM Collaborate Pro is the closest equivalent for most teams, at roughly $1,284 per user per year list.
Is a cloud platform cheaper than on-premise CAD?
It moves spend from capital to subscription, which helps cash flow and hardware refresh cycles. Whether the three-year total is lower depends entirely on seat count and which tier you land on, so it is not a saving you should assume.
Should we build our own BIM platform?
Almost never the whole platform. Building the specific layer where model data meets your operations is a different and much smaller question, and it is often worth it.
What actually drives the final quote?
Seat count, contract length, the mix of Docs, Collaborate Pro and Build, and whether you buy direct or through a reseller. Two firms of the same size routinely pay different amounts.
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